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A charitable interpretation of Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) would proclaim that Anne Lambright has written two books. At the core, she provides a fine analysis of the diverse ways that individuals and communities processed, commemorated, or remembered the gruesome violence of Peru from 1980 to 1992, when the Shining Path and the Peruvian state outdid one another in human rights violations. She examines cinema, literature, theater, and art (individual and collective) to explore the many ways that people understood the violence and its aftermath as well as potential paths toward reconciliation or justice. She frames this project, however, by casting the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) and its final report as a conformist or mainstream version of events written from the perspective of the powers that be in Lima. The works that she studies, from her perspective, radically diverge from and question the CVR. This is a terrible misrepresentation that puts into question the validity of her larger arguments.

Here is my review of the massive, ten-volume collection of Heinrich Witt’s memoirs. Kudos to Ulrich Mücke. As I stress in the review, this is a wonderful source for Peruvian history. I would love to see someone digitalize the index (and perhaps translate it). That way researchers can find references to topics as diverse Chinese in Lima to muleteers in the Andes. Translate all ten volumes, thousands of pages, might be too much to ask. -CW

Born near Hamburg in 1799, Heinrich Witt arrived in Peru in 1824 and spent most of his life there as an agent for a number ofmerchant houses, including his own. He crossed the Atlantic numerous times, traveling extensively in Europe as well as Peru and Chile. Witt dedicated extraordinary effort to his diaries, writing almost daily (in English) and revising it with the aid of secretaries. When his vision declined in his old age, he had friends and employees read it out loud to him, allowing him to relive his anecdotes and to make corrections and additions. He ultimately wrote thirteen volumes with more than 11,000 pages, although only ten volumes are available today. In print, the ten volumes add up to more than 5,500 pages. The online version sold by Brill includes two rough drafts of diaries not part of the print edition.

In this study of the Tupac Amaru rebellion, the first to appear in English since 1966, Charles Walker offers a lucid and engaging account of the Andean peasant insurrections which, as they swept through the southern Andes in the early 1780s, confronted Spanish rule with its longest and most violent challenge before the wars of independence. He focuses primarily on the movement started by the charismatic Indian noble who took the name ‘Tupac Amaru’ to signal his claims to Inca kingship, and, backed by family members, used his social prestige and connections to mobilise peasant insurrection in the old Inca heartlands. This is, however, part of a bigger story, in which Walker traces the interactions between the rebellion of Quechua-speaking rebels around Cuzco and the several distinctive uprisings among peasant communities in Upper Peru (Bolivia), some of which pre-dated Tupac Amaru’s rebellion and had a dynamic of their own. In so doing, he aims at creating a comprehensive, comparative picture of these intersecting rebellions, asking why they started and spread, who became involved, what the rebels wanted and believed, how they behaved, and what they achieved.